stargirl Archives - Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources

As we all know by now, DC is adding “co-features” to (so far) three of its titles: “Blue Beetle” in Booster Gold, “Ravager” in Teen Titans, and the previously-announced “Metal Men” in the new Doom Patrol. Each title will be $3.99, which presumably indicates that each title will contain at least 30 pages of story altogether. Assuming that the headliners will still get 22 pages per issue, this leaves a respectable 8 pages for the “co-feature,” although if it’s just 8 pages we might as well call it a “backup.”

Regardless of what you call it, I like this idea quite a bit. Backup stories expose readers to a greater variety of characters, creative teams, and storytelling styles. Furthermore, as long as DC feels compelled to increase its regular titles’ price point, $3.99 for 30 pages is about the same as (and a thin hair more economical than) $2.99 for 22 pages. This is not exactly a new strategy for DC: for books cover-dated September 1980, it added eight pages of story and art to all its books (going from 17 pages to 25), raised the price 25% (from $0.40 to $0.50), and in most cases used the extra pages for backups. Many of these starred familiar characters like Adam Strange, Aquaman, and the (Earth-2) Huntress, but many were used to spotlight the less familiar (Firestorm, OMAC) or to debut new characters (Nemesis). Since Newsarama indicated that “[m]ore books will have co-features added to them in the coming month,” let’s consider who might be returning in backup form.